Much of this story will be familiar to those who have read Richard Kluger’s Ashes to Ashes, Stanton Glantz’s The Cigarette Papers, and Allan Brandt’s The Cigarette Century. But what makes Golden Holocaust so valuable is that in the years since those fine books appeared, advances in computing and optical scanning have made the tobacco industry’s once-secret archives of memoranda, scientific studies, and outright chicanery freely available. One can now type in any search term into this massive database, and so Proctor has been able to drill this quarry deeper and wider. The result, in Proctor’s hands, is a forcefully written and genuinely alarming tour de force of history, public health, and muckraking.

The combatant nations of World War I learned through logistical error and terrible suffering the importance of securing adequate food supplies in a prolonged armed conflict. Not least as a result of this experience, as Lizzie Collingham shows in her superb new study The Taste of War, these same nations went to considerable lengths to keep their armies and civilian populations alive and well fed during World War II.